Off the top, this a very good open-world game. It's very much a Ubisoft-style icon-driven climb-the-towers kinda deal, but, buoyed by an already-great battle system with some slight added complexity and 7 party members each with their own unique mechanics, it evolves into something that plays wonderfully within the form. With all the bespoke side quests, wild variety of mini-games, and a whole-ass, really good card game, it's extremely easy to bounce around from task-to-task and wonder where your last 5 hours went. It feels like the dev team played a lot of Yakuza between Remake and Rebirth. The dungeons are way better than in Remake and the boss fights are excellent. Just like Remake, it is extremely good at endearing the characters to you with many small, funny interactions. The music is uniformly excellent. This is an 80 hour game but between all of this I only started to get tired of it right near the end. If I was younger I might've 100%-ed it, and had a good time doing so. As a videogame-ass videogame, Square-Enix nailed it.

But Rebirth has to answer a lot of open questions posed by Remake and I have to say it pretty much totally fumbles the bag. The end of Remake suggested a wide open plain, the characters no longer shackled by the past, a promise that nothing is sacred and everything you knew of the original FF7 could turn out differently. Rebirth throws this away. It rejiggers the order of things, there are some new ideas, there's lore that didn't used to be there, and oh boy the multiverse is here. But fundamentally this hits the same beats, big and small, as the original, even when it acts like it doesn't.

Aerith's fate is the obvious question at the heart of it, and what the game lands on is the worst of both worlds. Nomura cannot imagine Aerith as anything but defined by her death, but since the assumption is that the player is going in knowing how this plays out in the original - or maybe to create some sort of vagueness or mystery around what actually happened? The intention is unclear, though the events aren't really - it also skips over the emotional catharsis entirely. No "Shut up.", no laying Aerith to rest, no expressions of real grief. Aerith is still dead and still in the lifestream, praying to save the world. The only difference is that she can appear as a force ghost now.

The last few hours of this game has made me extremely cynical about the Remake project as a whole, with all of those little new details, all that loudness, amounting to various bits of icing on the same 30 year old cake. What once seemed like a well of possibility is instead revealed as slavishly devoted to the original, while simultaneously skipping over many of the dramatic moments that made it hit in the first place. It would've been better if they picked a lane - a weirdo remake/sequel for the OG fans or a straight re-telling for a new generation, with all the big moments intact and rendered in high definition. Instead you get a middleground that satisfies nobody.

It's frustrating to like something so much and have it almost entirely fall apart in its final hours. I'm too morbidly curious not to see how this whole thing wraps up, but mostly I wish this very talented team could be removed from the overwhelming weight of expectation and make something entirely new.